Extracting curved text lines using local linearity of the text line

In order to enhance the ability of document analysis systems, we need a text line extraction method which can handle not only straight text lines but also text lines in various shapes. This paper proposes a new method called Extended Linear Segment Linking (ELSL for short), which is able to extract text lines in arbitrary orientations and curved text lines. We also consider the existence of both horizontally and vertically printed text lines on the same page. The new method can produce text line candidates for multiple orientations. We verify the ability of the method by some experiments as well. Received December 21, 1998 / Revised version September 2, 1999     

Fast perspective recovery of text in natural scenes

Cheap, ubiquitous, high-resolution digital cameras have led to opportunities that demand camera-based text understanding, such as wearable computing or assistive technology. Perspective distortion is one of the main challenges for text recognition in camera captured images since the camera may often not have a fronto-parallel view of the text. We present a method for perspective recovery of text in natural scenes, where text can appear as isolated words, short sentences or small paragraphs (as found on posters, billboards, shop and street signs etc.). It relies on the geometry of the characters themselves to estimate a rectifying homography for every line of text, irrespective of the view of the text over a large range of orientations. The horizontal perspective foreshortening is corrected by fitting two lines to the top and bottom of the text, while the vertical perspective foreshortening and shearing are estimated by performing a linear regression on the shear variation of the individual characters within the text line. The proposed method is efficient and fast. We present comparative results with improved recognition accuracy against the current state-of-the-art.     

Extraction of special effects caption text events from digital video

Abstract. The popularity of digital video is increasing rapidly. To help users navigate libraries of video, algorithms that automatically index video based on content are needed. One approach is to extract text appearing in video, which often reflects a scene's semantic content. This is a difficult problem due to the unconstrained nature of general-purpose video. Text can have arbitrary color, size, and orientation. Backgrounds may be complex and changing. Most work so far has made restrictive assumptions about the nature of text occurring in video. Such work is therefore not directly applicable to unconstrained, general-purpose video. In addition, most work so far has focused only on detecting the spatial extent of text in individual video frames. However, text occurring in video usually persists for several seconds. This constitutes a text event that should be entered only once in the video index. Therefore it is also necessary to determine the temporal extent of text events. This is a non-trivial problem because text may move, rotate, grow, shrink, or otherwise change over time. Such text effects are common in television programs and commercials but so far have received little attention in the literature. This paper discusses detecting, binarizing, and tracking caption text in general-purpose MPEG-1 video. Solutions are proposed for each of these problems and compared with existing work found in the literature. Received: January 29, 2002 / Accepted: September 13, 2002 D. Crandall is now with Eastman Kodak Company, 1700 Dewey Avenue, Rochester, NY 14650-1816, USA; e-mail: david.crandall@kodak.com S. Antani is now with the National Library of Medicine, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, MD 20894, USA; e-mail: antani@nlm.nih.gov Correspondence to: David Crandall     

Automatic text segmentation and text recognition for video indexing

Efficient indexing and retrieval of digital video is an important function of video databases. One powerful index for retrieval is the text appearing in them. It enables content-based browsing. We present our new methods for automatic segmentation of text in digital videos. The algorithms we propose make use of typical characteristics of text in videos in order to enable and enhance segmentation performance. The unique features of our approach are the tracking of characters and words over their complete duration of occurrence in a video and the integration of the multiple bitmaps of a character over time into a single bitmap. The output of the text segmentation step is then directly passed to a standard OCR software package in order to translate the segmented text into ASCII. Also, a straightforward indexing and retrieval scheme is introduced. It is used in the experiments to demonstrate that the proposed text segmentation algorithms together with existing text recognition algorithms are suitable for indexing and retrieval of relevant video sequences in and from a video database. Our experimental results are very encouraging and suggest that these algorithms can be used in video retrieval applications as well as to recognize higher level semantics in videos.     

Efficient and flexible text extraction from document pages

This paper describes a novel method for extracting text from document pages of mixed content. The method works by detecting pieces of text lines in small overlapping columns of width , shifted with respect to each other by image elements (good default values are: of the image width, ) and by merging these pieces in a bottom-up fashion to form complete text lines and blocks of text lines. The algorithm requires about 1.3 s for a 300 dpi image on a PC with a Pentium II CPU, 300 MHz, MotherBoard Intel440LX. The algorithm is largely independent of the layout of the document, the shape of the text regions, and the font size and style. The main assumptions are that the background be uniform and that the text sit approximately horizontally. For a skew of up to about 10 degrees no skew correction mechanism is necessary. The algorithm has been tested on the UW English Document Database I of the University of Washington and its performance has been evaluated by a suitable measure of segmentation accuracy. Also, a detailed analysis of the segmentation accuracy achieved by the algorithm as a function of noise and skew has been carried out. Received April 4, 1999 / Revised June 1, 1999     

Pitch-based segmentation and recognition of dot-matrix text

Dot-matrix text recognition is a difficult problem, especially when characters are broken into several disconnected components. We present a dot-matrix text recognition system which uses the fact that dot-matrix fonts are fixed-pitch, in order to overcome the difficulty of the segmentation process. After finding the most likely pitch of the text, a decision is made as to whether the text is written in a fixed-pitch or proportional font. Fixed-pitch text is segmented using a pitch-based segmentation process that can successfully segment both touching and broken characters. We report performance results for the pitch estimation, fixed-pitch decision and segmentation, and recognition processes. Received October 18, 1999 / Revised April 21, 2000     

Rectification and recognition of text in 3-D scenes

Real-world text on street signs, nameplates, etc. often lies in an oblique plane and hence cannot be recognized by traditional OCR systems due to perspective distortion. Furthermore, such text often comprises only one or two lines, preventing the use of existing perspective rectification methods that were primarily designed for images of document pages. We propose an approach that reliably rectifies and subsequently recognizes individual lines of text. Our system, which includes novel algorithms for extraction of text from real-world scenery, perspective rectification, and binarization, has been rigorously tested on still imagery as well as on MPEG-2 video clips in real time.Received: 15 December 2003, Published online: 14 December 2004Gregory K. Myers: Correspondence to     

Coarse-to-fine adaptive masks for appearance matching of occluded scenes

In this paper, we discuss an appearance-matching approach to the difficult problem of interpreting color scenes containing occluded objects. We have explored the use of an iterative, coarse-to-fine sum-squared-error method that uses information from hypothesized occlusion events to perform run-time modification of scene-to-template similarity measures. These adjustments are performed by using a binary mask to adaptively exclude regions of the template image from the squared-error computation. At each iteration higher resolution scene data as well as information derived from the occluding interactions between multiple object hypotheses are used to adjust these masks. We present results which demonstrate that such a technique is reasonably robust over a large database of color test scenes containing objects at a variety of scales, and tolerates minor 3D object rotations and global illumination variations. Received: 21 November 1996 / Accepted: 14 October 1997     

Stop word location and identification for adaptive text recognition

Abstract. We propose a new adaptive strategy for text recognition that attempts to derive knowledge about the dominant font on a given page. The strategy uses a linguistic observation that over half of all words in a typical English passage are contained in a small set of less than 150 stop words. A small dictionary of such words is compiled from the Brown corpus. An arbitrary text page first goes through layout analysis that produces word segmentation. A fast procedure is then applied to locate the most likely candidates for those words, using only widths of the word images. The identity of each word is determined using a word shape classifier. Using the word images together with their identities, character prototypes can be extracted using a previously proposed method. We describe experiments using simulated and real images. In an experiment using 400 real page images, we show that on average, eight distinct characters can be learned from each page, and the method is successful on 90% of all the pages. These can serve as useful seeds to bootstrap font learning. Received October 8, 1999 / Revised March 29, 2000     

OCRSpell: an interactive spelling correction system for OCR errors in text

In this paper, we describe a spelling correction system designed specifically for OCR-generated text that selects candidate words through the use of information gathered from multiple knowledge sources. This system for text correction is based on static and dynamic device mappings, approximate string matching, and n-gram analysis. Our statistically based, Bayesian system incorporates a learning feature that collects confusion information at the collection and document levels. An evaluation of the new system is presented as well. Received August 16, 2000 / Revised October 6, 2000     

An experimental evaluation of OCR text representations for learning document classifiers

In the literature, many feature types are proposed for document classification. However, an extensive and systematic evaluation of the various approaches has not yet been done. In particular, evaluations on OCR documents are very rare. In this paper we investigate seven text representations based on n-grams and single words. We compare their effectiveness in classifying OCR texts and the corresponding correct ASCII texts in two domains: business letters and abstracts of technical reports. Our results indicate that the use of n-grams is an attractive technique which can even compare to techniques relying on a morphological analysis. This holds for OCR texts as well as for correct ASCII texts. Received February 17, 1998 / Revised April 8, 1998     

An architecture for handwritten text recognition systems

This paper presents an end-to-end system for reading handwritten page images. Five functional modules included in the system are introduced in this paper: (i) pre-processing, which concerns introducing an image representation for easy manipulation of large page images and image handling procedures using the image representation; (ii) line separation, concerning text line detection and extracting images of lines of text from a page image; (iii) word segmentation, which concerns locating word gaps and isolating words from a line of text image obtained efficiently and in an intelligent manner; (iv) word recognition, concerning handwritten word recognition algorithms; and (v) linguistic post-pro- cessing, which concerns the use of linguistic constraints to intelligently parse and recognize text. Key ideas employed in each functional module, which have been developed for dealing with the diversity of handwriting in its various aspects with a goal of system reliability and robustness, are described in this paper. Preliminary experiments show promising results in terms of speed and accuracy. Received October 30, 1998 / Revised January 15, 1999     

Analysis of locking behavior in three real database systems

Concurrency control is essential to the correct functioning of a database due to the need for correct, reproducible results. For this reason, and because concurrency control is a well-formulated problem, there has developed an enormous body of literature studying the performance of concurrency control algorithms. Most of this literature uses either analytic modeling or random number-driven simulation, and explicitly or implicitly makes certain assumptions about the behavior of transactions and the patterns by which they set and unset locks. Because of the difficulty of collecting suitable measurements, there have been only a few studies which use trace-driven simulation, and still less study directed toward the characterization of concurrency control behavior of real workloads. In this paper, we present a study of three database workloads, all taken from IBM DB2 relational database systems running commercial applications in a production environment. This study considers topics such as frequency of locking and unlocking, deadlock and blocking, duration of locks, types of locks, correlations between applications of lock types, two-phase versus non-two-phase locking, when locks are held and released, etc. In each case, we evaluate the behavior of the workload relative to the assumptions commonly made in the research literature and discuss the extent to which those assumptions may or may not lead to erroneous conclusions. Edited by H. Garcia-Molina. Received April 5, 1994 / Accepted November 1, 1995     

Improved quadratic normal vector interpolation for realistic shading

Published online: 19 July 2001     

An unconstrained handwriting recognition system

In this paper, an integrated offline recognition system for unconstrained handwriting is presented. The proposed system consists of seven main modules: skew angle estimation and correction, printed-handwritten text discrimination, line segmentation, slant removing, word segmentation, and character segmentation and recognition, stemming from the implementation of already existing algorithms as well as novel algorithms. This system has been tested on the NIST, IAM-DB, and GRUHD databases and has achieved accuracy that varies from 65.6% to 100% depending on the database and the experiment.     

HyperMask – projecting a talking head onto a real object

Published online: 15 March 2002